Chapter 77: What the Town Will Not Do
They asked Vorrin Ashe to write it, and it took him four days to say yes.
That was not reluctance. Vorrin had been in Hearthroot two winters and had never once volunteered for anything, and everybody had stopped being offended by it around the time they worked out what it was. He had spent twenty years assessing tax for Deuna. He had walked out. He did not think a man who had done the first thing got to be eager about the second.
So he waited to be asked, every time, and every time it cost him something to be asked, and he did the work better than anybody.
Hanne asked him on the sixteenth, at his own door, alone, because she had worked that out too.
"We need somebody who isn’t going and doesn’t hold the book," she said. "That’s four hundred people."
"You need somebody who’s read a contingency before," Vorrin said. "That’s me, and you know it, and that’s why you came alone."
***
He brought it on the twentieth, four pages, in a hand like a fence.
"I’ve done it in two halves," he said. "What the town does, and what it won’t. The second half’s longer, and I’d like to say why before anybody reads it."
"Go on," Hanne said.
"Because the first half’s easy and it’ll make you feel better, and the second half is the only part still true in a year." He put his palm flat on the second sheet. "Everything I ever wrote for Deuna had a first half. That’s how you end up doing something terrible slowly, one comfortable page at a time."
Nobody said anything.
"Read the first half," Edrin said.
So Vorrin read it.
*If the custodians do not return within thirty days of the examination, custody of the register passes to the drawn pair for that month, jointly, and to the next pair after them, and so on, and no single person holds it at any time.*
*The pending column is not closed. The forty-four remain listed, and the two absent names are entered in it, in their own column, with the date and the reason.*
*The town writes to the Marches, to Corvane, and to the Guild, in that order, and keeps copies.*
*The town continues.*
"That last line’s a clause," Vorrin said. "It isn’t a sentiment. If you read it as one I’ll take it out."
The second half took longer, and it went badly, which he had said it would.
*The town will not send anyone after them.*
*The town will not petition on these grounds again, because a further petition requires another subject to appear, and there is no version of this town that spends a third person on the same door.*
*The town will not accept an offer of return in exchange for anything — not for the register, not for the charter, not for a name, not for a person.*
*The town will not ask the free packs, the wardens, or any ally to do what it has forbidden itself.*
Rhavena went out at the fourth one.
She did not slam anything. She stood up, said "no," said it once more from the doorway with her back to the room, and walked out onto the flat, and Tovan started to follow her and Ivara caught his sleeve and shook her head.
Vorrin waited.
"Should I stop?" he said.
"No," Hanne said. "Read the rest."
*The town will not treat the absence of the founder as a vacancy. There is no founder of record. The office does not exist and will not be recreated for the convenience of grief.*
Edrin put his hand over his eyes.
"That’s the one," he said. "That’s the one that had to be in there, and I couldn’t have written it."
"You could have written it," Vorrin said. "You couldn’t have read it out."
Rhavena came back an hour later and stood at the back with her arms folded.
"I’m not withdrawing it," she said. "I want the record to show I hate every line of that second half and I understand every line of it. Those are two different things. Write both."
"Anser’s been writing you down since Frostmere," Hanne said.
"Good."
She looked at Vorrin for a while.
"You wrote a good paper," she said, in the voice of somebody having a tooth out. "I don’t like that either."
Vorrin, who had spent two winters being politely not trusted, took about four seconds too long to answer.
"Thank you," he said.
***
Souk’s letter came back on the twenty-first.
The stationer in Ashvale had written four lines. He regretted that he could not discuss the affairs of his customers. He noted that his stock records were his own. He wished the office of the Hearthroot roll every success in its enquiries.
And then, at the bottom, in a different ink, as though it had been added later and by a man who had thought about it for a while:
*I have not sold the Verrick stock to anybody since the eleventh of Frostmere.*
Souk read it four times and then put it down on the table with two fingers, the way she did.
"He answered."
"He said he wouldn’t discuss it," Mataon said.
"He didn’t discuss it. He told me a date and a stock name and let me do the rest, and he did it in a way he can swear was volunteered." She was already at the wall with the pins. "The Verrick stock is what our friend writes on. He has not sold any since the eleventh of Frostmere. That is ninety-one days."
"So they stopped buying."
"So they stopped buying from him. Which means either they have another supplier, and there isn’t one in the band, or they laid in enough in Frostmere to last a year."
She turned round.
"You lay in a year of paper when you think it’s about to get harder to buy. That’s a man expecting attention. That’s a man who knew, in Frostmere, that this was coming."
"Frostmere is before Corvane ever handed me the code."
"Yes," said Souk. "It is."
He brought his own question to the bench on the twenty-second, because that was the rule and because he had run out of ways to put it off.
He stated it plainly. The instrument admits any subject of the roll. He was a subject of the roll. He intended to appear.
Hanne let the room finish and then said the thing he had not expected.
"We can’t decide this."
"You decided the last one."
"The last one was the town spending a protection. That was ours." She had the second book open in front of her and she did not look at it, because she had already read the line she was about to say. "You’re not going as a citizen of Hearthroot. You can’t. The charter doesn’t reach Deuna and you told us so yourself in the lane in Sylphenia and Anser wrote it down."
"That’s convenient for me."
"It is extremely inconvenient for me," Hanne said. "I’d very much like the authority to forbid you and I haven’t got it, and pretending I have would be worse than useless. You’re going as a subject of their roll. It’s their instrument and their jurisdiction and your body. The roll declines."
Anser wrote it.
*The roll declines to rule. Reason: the matter is not within the charter’s reach. This binds the roll, and it binds the next pair, and nobody is to comfort themselves with it.*
"I put that last sentence in myself," Hanne said. "Leave it."
Barni found him on the wall afterwards, out by the gate where the wind was worst and nobody went.
He got up on the stones with the ugly hop he did when his back was bad and would not be helped, and sat down, and looked out at the road.
"Don’t," Mataon said.
"I’ve not said anything."
"You’re about to."
"I am not." Barni’s ears went flat and came back up. "I have been thinking about doors for a fortnight and I have got exactly one thing to say and it is not an argument."
"Then say it."
"I have been through a door I did not understand." He kept his eyes on the road. "I came out the other side as something that could not explain what had happened to it, and everybody who knew me was already dead, and the worst part, Matski, was not the door. It was that nobody was standing outside it counting the days."
The wind came up over the stones.
"I’ll be counting," he said. "That’s all. I wanted you to have it before you went, so you’d know it was there. It isn’t much and it isn’t nothing."
Mataon did not trust his voice for a moment.
"That’s the closest thing to a straight answer you’ve given me in eighteen months of my life," he said.
"Yes, well." Barni put his chin down on his paws. "Don’t tell anyone. I have a position to maintain."